International Women Stage Directors

South Africa

South Africa Marié-Heleen Coetzee and Lliane Loots [O]ne of the few profoundly non-racial institutions in South Africa is patriarchy . . . Patriarchy brutalizes men and neutralizes women across the colour line. At the same time, gender inequality takes on a specifically apartheid-related character ; there is inequality within inequality . . . some are more unequal than others. —Albie Sachs Judge Albie Sachs’s words allow us to step into the minefield that is gender in South Africa. When looking at how women theatre directors have shaped and continue to shape a theatrical landscape, it becomes imperative to understand gender as one of the most invidious domains of oppression within a South African context. Often, when we imagine the landscape of South Africa’s history, the political understanding is overwhelmingly one of race and the apartheid legacy; however, Sachs offers a reminder that all power struggles are interconnected and gender remains the most prevailing. Women’s Rights: Historical Context Narrating a history of women theatre directors in South Africa requires an understanding of the multiplicity and interconnectedness of the power dynamics underpinning South African society. Power operates primarily around the collisions of nationalism, race, class, and gender, and it is framed against the backdrop of historical white privilege. The constantly renegotiated and rewritten contemporary histories of South Africa have dominantly focused on nationalist and race revision. Women’s voices, however, remain relatively marginalized or co-opted in the re-telling of the history of South Africa and its theatre. Although feminist scholar Lizbeth Goodman laments that South African women directors are few and far between, there has, in fact, been a very long history of women theatre directors who assisted in shaping the landscape of South African theatre of the twenty-first century—a history that is still to be fully explored and recorded. South African women theatre directors, more so than their male counterparts, seem to have simultaneous and multiple professional roles, primarily as actor-playwright-directorproducer , to maintain visibility. This multiplicity of roles reflects women’s attempts to claim a right to control their own artistic voices, thereby representing an alternate identity that is both powerful in agency and beautifully theatrical. There are key periods in South African history that reveal women fighting for their rights and redefining their place in theatre that have had a profound influence on the development of theatre and women directors. One such period developed after the white minority Nationalist Party came into power in 1945: the Apartheid Separate Development Policies, dictating the geographical residence of black Africans and denying their rights to vote, own land, or travel without passbooks.1 The second of these periods is the 1950s, which marked the intensification of the anti-apartheid passive resistance campaign and saw the writing of the first women’s charter in Southern Africa. This culminated in the 1956 women’s pass law march in Pretoria where women across race, class, and language divisions demonstrated peacefully against the imposition of pass laws on South African black women.2 This vocal show of solidarity among women made visible issues that women specifically faced under apartheid, primarily the profound understanding of the “double oppression” faced by black women in terms of both race and gender. With the growing awareness that resistance was possible, many theatre makers working outside of mainstream government-funded spaces realized that theatre was a cultural weapon. Protest theatre emerged more fully as a genre in the late 1960s, and its roots lay in protest marches that allowed ordinary citizens to voice their opposition. Despite years of protest in various arenas, it was only in 1994, with the release of Nelson Mandela and the unbanning of the African National Congress, that black women were finally allowed to vote in South Africa. Early Women Directors Temple Hauptfleisch states that early South African theatre history is steeped in an Afrikaner nationalist and British colonialist history, yet it is also indebted to a precolonial , indigenous performance heritage (“Beyond” 181). Indigenous modes of theatrical performance—including storytelling, praise poetry, and dancing—were practiced as an integral part of indigenous cultures’ social and spiritual practices long before the colonial era. However, these forms were largely dismissed as quasi-theatrical or as tourist attrac278 Marié-Heleen Coetzee and Lliane Loots tions. Imported British colonial theatre acted as an instrument of cultural dominance and an expression of imperialist ideals from the late 1700s onward. By 1910 South Africa’s British...